I am pleased to announce an upgraded version of the Wordzen Chrome Extension, now available from the Chrome Extension Store as Wordzen for Gmail 2.0.

If you already have Wordzen 1.0 installed, then to upgrade, you can go to the Extensions tab in your Chrome browser, check "Developer mode," and click the "Update extensions now" button. Doing so will upgrade your Chrome browser to Wordzen 2.0, but likely leave it in a Disabled state. Be sure to check the box next to it to re-enable it. When you load Gmail, do a hard refresh to load the new extension.

Even if you don't manually update your extensions using the method above, Chrome will eventually auto-update your browser to the latest version of Wordzen. This may take several days though.

You'll know if you've successfully upgraded because the new Wordzen button says "Wordzen!" instead of "Smart Send", and has the Wordzen brain icon next to it.

There are several important reasons why you should upgrade:

A few bugs have been fixed, including one where a blank Gmail message resulted in Gmail freezing if the Wordzen button was clicked and another that sometimes froze Gmail if a message had an inline image or attachment.

The new extension is more stable -- the old extension sometimes caused the Compose button bar to undulate up and down while you type in the Message area.

The new extension plays well with other extensions. Previously, users with both Boomerang and Wordzen had difficulty because the Wordzen button would sometimes fail to appear.

The new extension provides for better error handling and more descriptive error messages, in the rare case that an error does occur.

The new extension sets us up to be able to integrate with Google's Inbox in the future, although the Wordzen button currently will not show up if you're using Inbox instead of Gmail.

The new extension includes a framework that will eventually allow Wordzen to work on mobile email clients on the iPhone and Android devices.

Are you a curious developer?

The new Wordzen Chrome extension has been built from the ground-up using Streak's Inbox SDK platform. We are waiting for Inbox SDK to support Firefox, after which we'll release an updated Mozilla Firefox Add-On as well.